Ever wanted to work for the fathers of Playstation? Well, Sony are now giving you the opportunity with the announcement of a new reality series entitled The Tester, which will run exclusively on the PSN this winter. Participants will be the subject of various elimination challenges, with the aim of testing their “mental prowess, dexterity and video game knowledge.” The winner will land themselves a position as a paid games tester, i.e. “The Tester”.

Details can be found on the offcial website – to enter you simply have to record a short video and submit it to the aforementioned website. Are we about to see Sony meets The Apprentice?

It all sounds a bit loose at the moment, but the concept of Sony conducting a reality series is intriguing nonetheless. The only snag? You have to be American to enter. Typical.

I can see this show being forced to pimp itself out. I know plenty of full-time testers who, even though they love what they do, are the first person to tell you that it is a monotonous, low-paying job.

That being said, I’d still love to do it… just not through a dodgy reality program.

Yeah, they sell the idea of “playing games all day” but as two examples of what some testers had to do.
To make sure inventory systems where okay, they would be in a room where each item in the game had been spawned, and they would pick up and drop each item a bundle of times, to make sure it all worked. Sounds fun.
On a port, it kind of messed up geometry of bounding boxes, and as such the floor had gaps, designers were working to fix gaps but needed to know where they were. Testers would have a full time job to go into the levels jumping about everywhere just to test if they could find holes in the ground.
Again, joyful stuff.